Imagine you’ve just seen something you found awe-inspiring—perhaps you watched the sun set over the ocean, were immersed in an art exhibit, or saw your favorite band perform. Now imagine that, on your way home, a stranger stops you and asks you for a favor. How likely are you to help them?
According to research, the fact that you were feeling awe might make you more likely to help. For example, people experiencing awe are more likely to pick up pens someone dropped or volunteer for a cause. Additionally, children experiencing awe are more likely to help refugee families.
But why exactly does awe inspire us to be more helpful? New research is still exploring this question.
Awe makes us feel more connected to others
In a recent paper published in the Journal of Positive Psychology, researchers looked at awe and helping others during the COVID-19 pandemic. During June and July 2020, 332 college students filled out a series of three surveys that asked them how often they felt awe (including awe toward nature and awe for health care workers) and how willing they were to volunteer or donate materials to help the fight against COVID-19. In addition, the researchers also surveyed participants’ feelings, including how connected they felt to others and how much sympathy and compassion (what researchers call empathic concern) they felt toward COVID patients.
The researchers found that people who experienced more awe at the start tended to increase in feelings of empathic concern and connectedness two weeks later. Additionally, they were also more willing to help others at the end of the four-week study.
The researchers analyzed the data further and found that people’s empathy and connectedness helped to account for their interest in helping others at the end of the study. In other words, the researchers suggest, awe first makes us feel more connected to others, which then makes us more empathic, which in turn makes us more likely to help.
How can we cultivate a sense of awe and be more helpful? In a follow-up study, the researchers found that writing about a time you felt awe makes you feel more connected to others and more willing to donate in certain situations, compared to writing about amusing or neutral topics.
Awe makes us feel small
Although these studies offer a promising explanation for how awe inspires helping, there are other possible explanations, as well. For example, past research has found that awe makes us more likely to conform to social norms—which suggests that we might help others because of a sense of obligation to hold up the social contract. Another line of research has suggested that awe might increase helping because it makes us feel small.
In a series of studies, researchers tested this out by inciting participants to feel awe in various ways and then measuring their sense of self as well as their willingness to help. In one study, participants who watched an awe-inspiring video of the natural world (a clip from Planet Earth) tended to share more “points” (that could be redeemed for raffle tickets) with another person, suggesting awe made them more generous. Additionally, the researchers asked participants whether they were feeling small—through statements such as “I feel small or insignificant” and “I feel the presence of something greater than myself”—and found that this helped explain their helpfulness.
When we consider something vast and awe-inspiring—like the Grand Canyon or a towering waterfall—our individual self and personal concerns may seem less significant in the grand scheme of things, so we behave in a less selfish way.
However, the paper in the Journal of Positive Psychology that looked at helping during the pandemic also measured feelings of “small self” along with feelings of empathy and connection. The researchers found that, in their studies, empathy and connection did account for how much people helped, but feeling small didn’t.
Other research, published recently in the journal Emotion, partly backs up the connection between awe and empathy. In this paper, researchers found that people who tend to experience more awe are also more likely to also rate themselves as empathic. However, when the researchers investigated whether inducing people to feel awe makes them more empathic, they found that experiencing momentary feelings of awe only increased empathy for some participants. In other words, more research is needed to figure out what exactly happens in our minds and hearts when we feel awe that could make us helpful toward others.
We already know that experiencing awe has a whole host of benefits. Yachen Li, a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto and lead author of the recent paper on awe and empathy, points out that everyday activities like walking in nature and visiting art museums can be ways to increase how much awe we experience. And while any one single activity may not change us overnight, these studies suggest that making time for awe could bring us closer to the people around us.
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